My father was working in a research project for the military during the '80s, one of those hush-hush things you're supposed to maintain absolute secrecy. At one time, he received an advisory from above warning people not to discuss sensitive information near their telephones - these are plain old-fashioned landlines. Turns out that they'd received information that they suspected certain foreign espionage agencies of using telephones as receivers. Apparently they'd call a number, let the person on the other end hang up, and somehow they managed to hold on to the connection, thus using the phone as a receiver. Never figured out if this was paranoia or if there was any gleam of truth in it, but it sounded feasible to me at the time.
Even incremental backup won't help if you have a very large volume of data. We have an incremental backup system in our company, and we often run into this sort of problem - a few days out of the month the backup won't be completed because it'll take longer than 24 hours for it to run through. Since backup and recovery isn't that visible until you have a big problem, less money has been put into it than our file servers and application servers, with the result that our backup servers are now having trouble handling the huge amount of data being spewed forth from our file servers.
The problem is, the average e-mail is not necessarily 10kb. While HTML can be part of the problem by making e-mails several times bigger than need be, my experience is that large attachments are generally the biggest culprits. A 20Mb powerpoint presentation sent by pointy-haired manager to all his minions can easily swamp the system. And trust me, there are plenty of clueless managers out there sending out Very Large Attachments. I've received 50Mb Excel spreadsheet once, which contained nothing but a single image of a chart scanned at a ridiculously high resolution. It's crap like this that swamps mail servers, not the two paragraph responses.
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My father was working in a research project for the military during the '80s, one of those hush-hush things you're supposed to maintain absolute secrecy. At one time, he received an advisory from above warning people not to discuss sensitive information near their telephones - these are plain old-fashioned landlines. Turns out that they'd received information that they suspected certain foreign espionage agencies of using telephones as receivers. Apparently they'd call a number, let the person on the other end hang up, and somehow they managed to hold on to the connection, thus using the phone as a receiver. Never figured out if this was paranoia or if there was any gleam of truth in it, but it sounded feasible to me at the time.
Even incremental backup won't help if you have a very large volume of data. We have an incremental backup system in our company, and we often run into this sort of problem - a few days out of the month the backup won't be completed because it'll take longer than 24 hours for it to run through. Since backup and recovery isn't that visible until you have a big problem, less money has been put into it than our file servers and application servers, with the result that our backup servers are now having trouble handling the huge amount of data being spewed forth from our file servers.
The problem is, the average e-mail is not necessarily 10kb. While HTML can be part of the problem by making e-mails several times bigger than need be, my experience is that large attachments are generally the biggest culprits. A 20Mb powerpoint presentation sent by pointy-haired manager to all his minions can easily swamp the system. And trust me, there are plenty of clueless managers out there sending out Very Large Attachments. I've received 50Mb Excel spreadsheet once, which contained nothing but a single image of a chart scanned at a ridiculously high resolution. It's crap like this that swamps mail servers, not the two paragraph responses.